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Title:

PISA

Date of publishing:

March 28, 2011

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1490

Category:

PISA

One of cApStAn’s showcase projects is the linguistic quality control in OECD/PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment initiated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), which currently extends to 68 countries, with as many as 85 national versions, in 46 languages. Every three years, PISA assesses and compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science. For PISA, cApStAn is in charge of systems for quality assurance and quality control of the translation or, more appropriately, the adaptation of the data collection instruments. With a view to ensuring that correctly answering the questions requires the same level of knowledge and elicits the same strategies in all languages – so that comparisons made across the participating countries are valid.

cApStAn is thus involved in drawing up guidelines, defining workflows, analysing verification outcomes and improving translation/adaptation and verification methodology from the very beginning. Our in-house linguists have contributed to producing the French source version of PISA materials (double translation by cApStAn, reconciliation by a representative of the PISA consortium, linguistic purity and equivalence check by cApStAn). Our expert verifiers have performed sentence by sentence comparisons of all target versions versus the French and the English source versions in each cycle: one cycle consists of a Field Trial and a Main Survey, and the cycles took place in 1999-2000, 2002-2003, 2005-2006, 2008-2009 and 2011-2012. Verification reports are drawn up for each verification exercise, and they have become more detailed, more specific and more thought-provoking with the years. For the PISA 2009 and PISA 2012 survey cycles, cApStAn has been (and still is) a member of the PISA Consortium.

A synthesis in Adapting Educational and Psychological Tests for Cross-Cultural Assessment (Hambleton, Merenda and Spielberger, 2005) acknowledges the "high level of test adaptation sophistication" in OECD/PISA.